National Affairs: A Policy Repudiated

President Eisenhower's decision to remove the Seventh Fleet as defense
for the Communist China mainland marked a complete repudiation of one
of the strangest policies in the history of the U.S.: the
Truman-Acheson policy of suppressing the Chinese Nationalist government
of Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek.

The Chinese Nationalists finished their withdrawal from the mainland
across the 100-mile straits to Formosa in December 1949. (Four months
earlier, Dean Acheson had tried to write off the Nationalists with the
China white paperan official attack on a friendly power without
precedent in the history of international relations.)...